You Can Afford to Get Sick in France

When Michael Moore’s film SICKO was released in 2007Ã‚Â we still hated the French for not joining the “cakewalk” that was to be the war in Iraq (you remember “freedom fries.”) This time Moore’s grievous error was to praise health care, not only in France, but Cuba as well.

Nobody’s perfect and neither is any country’s health care system but there is an important point made in the piece. A doctor who teaches at a prominent American medical school told me we criticize the French or Canadian or British models as “socialist”Ã‚Â — you know letting the government determine what health care should cost. But in this country we let the insurance companies determine what they’ll pay, the drug manufacturers what they’ll charge, and yet we call it “managed care.”